Gabriel Barata

Inesc-ID · Visualization and Intelligent Multimodal Interfaces (VIMMI)

Gamified learning is a novel concept that according to recent studies, can increase student activity and improve learning outcomes. However, little is known about how different students experience and are engaged by it. We present a long-term study which identified distinct behavioral and performance patterns in participants taking a gamified colle...

State of the art research shows that gamified learning can be used to engage students and help them perform better. However, most studies use a one-size-fits-all approach to gamification, where individual differences and needs are ignored. In a previous study, we identified four types of students attending a gamified college course, characterized b...

Gamification has been explored recently as a way to promote content delivery in education, yielding promising results. However, little is known regarding how it helps different students experience learning and acquire knowledge. In this paper we study and analyze data from a gamified engineering course, to search for distinct behavior patterns. We...

Gamification of education is a recent trend, and early experiments showed promising results. Students seem not only to perform better, but also to participate more and to feel more engaged with gamified learning. However, little is known regarding how different students are affected by gamification and how their learning experience may vary. In thi...

Gamified education is a novel concept, and early trials show its potential to engage students and improve their performance. However, little is known about how different students learn with gamification, and how their gaming habits influence their experience. In this paper we present a study where data regarding student performance and gaming prefe...

Gamification of education is a recent trend, and early experiments showed promising results. Students seem not only to perform better, but also to participate more and to feel more engaged with gamified learning. However, little is known regarding how different students are affected by gamification and how their learning experience may vary. In thi...

Games are of great interest in education. Their motivational qualities make players more persistent and resilient. In particular, virtual environments have proven to be good learning engagers, as they generate opportunities to create, explore and communicate. Here we present an exploratory study on how student autonomy and creativity can be improve...

In this paper we explore how gamification can be applied to education in order to improve student engagement. We present a study in which a college course was gamified, by including experience points, levels, badges, challenges and leaderboards. The study was five years long, where the first three were non-gamified years, and the last two regarded...

Well-designed games are good motivators by nature, as they imbue players with clear goals and a sense of reward and fulfillment, thus encouraging them to persist and endure in their quests. Recently, this motivational power has started to be applied to non- game contexts, a practice known as Gamification. This adds gaming elements to non-game proce...

Good games are good motivators by nature, as they make players feel rewarded and fulfilled, which pushes them forward to persist and resist frustration. Gamification is a novel technique that uses game elements like points and badges, to motivated and engage users into embracing new behaviors, such as improving one’s health condition, finances or p...

Well-designed games are good motivators by nature, as they imbue players with clear goals and a sense of reward and fulfillment, thus encouraging them to persist and endure in their quests. Recently, this motivational power has started to be applied to non-game contexts, a practice known as Gamification. This adds gaming elements to non-game proces...

Conversational agents have been subject of extensive research. An increasingly wider number of such agents simulate affective behavior in order to convey familiarity and increase believability. Nevertheless, the evolution of social relationships among people occurs gradually and the degree of intimacy associated with such relationships regulates pe...

Nowadays, a hitherto unseen amount of information can be found in the World Wide Web. While available, this information is fragmented among different web sites. This is especially true for implicit knowledge, not directly written in any one site, but arising from patterns and interactions between pages. For instance, the number of search results fo...

In this paper we present AppInsight, a visualization tool that enables users to reminisce on their computer usage history and derive meaningful insights about behaviors and trends. Human memory has the ability to re-experience episodes from our lives when supplied with suitable contextual cues, such as places, music, and so on. We explore a small s...

Over the last decade extensive research has been conducted in the area of conversational agents focusing in many different aspects of these agents. In this research, and aiming at building agents that maintain a social connection with users, empathy has been one of those areas, as it plays a leading role in the establishment of social relationships...